25 replies to this topic

[sknis]

The following post was made by LEK2.  Sometimes a little help on the simplest thing is just what is needed.  As a new user of Toast, it helped me !



"OMG... every have one of those User Interface Epiphany moments when all becomes clear? When you realize the designer of the software (and I am one of those myself) and you have completely different concepts of how the world should work?

I just managed to successfully edit a TiVo recording to crop out unwanted parts; the behavior of the cropping button in the center of the control bar is that EACH time you click it, a new pair of cropping marks appears. When you position the cropping marks, the area BETWEEN the marks is REMOVED (not saved). So you can put multiple sets of crop marks on the timeline, and that defines where video is discarded.

When you click the FINE checkbox, you get frame-level resolution of moving the selected crop mark with the left and right arrow keys... although the crop marks do NOT highlight to let you know they are selected... you just click on the one you want to move, then use the arrow keys to position it accurately. You can click on the frames at the bottom of the window to jump to a specific frame, but make sure you have the intended crop mark selected first as that is the one that will be moved.

When you save or close the window and choose to save changes, the video in Toast is in fact updated, but that is not reflected in the display unless you choose a different video format and then reselect the one you want. Just sloppy programming, I guess.

This is clearly a product that screams for one of those "Toast 9: The Missing Manual" type books."

Hope this helps someone. "

Edited by sknis, 27 November 2008 - 05:20 AM.

[Ed Wicks]

How would I edit/crop an ordinary dvd? Where is the cropping button, and where is the control bar? Pls back up and explain to me how I get to that point.
Thanks. Ed

[tsantee]

How would I edit/crop an ordinary dvd? Where is the cropping button, and where is the control bar? Pls back up and explain to me how I get to that point.
Thanks. Ed

When starting with an existing video DVD or VIDEO_TS folder the first step is to extract the MPEG video file from the DVD or VIDEO_TS folder. This is done by inserting the DVD (or placing a VIDEO_TS folder on the desktop or in the Movies folder) and then choosing DVD with the top button of the Toast Media Browser. In a couple seconds you'll see something appear in the browser window. Use the button below DVD to access the titles or chapters level of the DVD (or VIDEO_TS folder). Select what you want and add it to the Toast Video window with DVD video selected as the format.

When Toast finishes extracting the video, select a title in the Video window and click Edit. In the next window there is a button that launches the video in the Toast Video Player where you can mark your edit points. When you've finished marking what you want edited out of the video choose Save in the Video Player. You'll see that the length of the video in the Video window is less than it was before your edits.

You now can set up the menu the way you want. To change the thumbnail image that will be the menu button click on the thumbnail in the Video window and a scroll bar appears beneath the thumbnail.

When Toast extracted the MPEG file from the DVD it wrote it to the Roxio Converted Items folder which by default is in your Documents folder. The Toast default is to automatically empty this folder when quitting Toast. If you don't want that to happen you can change the default in Toast Preferences.

[Ed Wicks]

When starting with an existing video DVD or VIDEO_TS folder the first step is to extract the MPEG video file from the DVD or VIDEO_TS folder. This is done by inserting the DVD (or placing a VIDEO_TS folder on the desktop or in the Movies folder) and then choosing DVD with the top button of the Toast Media Browser. In a couple seconds you'll see something appear in the browser window. Use the button below DVD to access the titles or chapters level of the DVD (or VIDEO_TS folder). Select what you want and add it to the Toast Video window with DVD video selected as the format.

When Toast finishes extracting the video, select a title in the Video window and click Edit. In the next window there is a button that launches the video in the Toast Video Player where you can mark your edit points. When you've finished marking what you want edited out of the video choose Save in the Video Player. You'll see that the length of the video in the Video window is less than it was before your edits.

You now can set up the menu the way you want. To change the thumbnail image that will be the menu button click on the thumbnail in the Video window and a scroll bar appears beneath the thumbnail.

When Toast extracted the MPEG file from the DVD it wrote it to the Roxio Converted Items folder which by default is in your Documents folder. The Toast default is to automatically empty this folder when quitting Toast. If you don't want that to happen you can change the default in Toast Preferences.

Thank you. I do not think I would ever have figured this out for myself! Ed

[Hillska]

--When you position the cropping marks, the area BETWEEN the marks is REMOVED (not saved).

This is contrary to what tech support claims it should do.  I was (still am) having trouble with this issue, so I created a help ticket.  They sent me this link:

http://kb.roxio.com/search.aspx?URL=/conte...63T&PARAMS=

In short, it says that the video portion highlighted in yellow is the portion that will be RETAINED.  Anyway, I can't seem to get more than one set of cropping marks no matter how many times I press the crop button.

I agree that the documentation is pretty bad.  In the words of Will Smith from "Philadadelphia", can you explain this to me as if I were a 4 year old?

[tsantee]

--When you position the cropping marks, the area BETWEEN the marks is REMOVED (not saved).

This is contrary to what tech support claims it should do.  I was (still am) having trouble with this issue, so I created a help ticket.  They sent me this link:

http://kb.roxio.com/search.aspx?URL=/conte...63T&PARAMS=

In short, it says that the video portion highlighted in yellow is the portion that will be RETAINED.  Anyway, I can't seem to get more than one set of cropping marks no matter how many times I press the crop button.

I agree that the documentation is pretty bad.  In the words of Will Smith from "Philadadelphia", can you explain this to me as if I were a 4 year old?

What format is the video you are wanting to edit?

[Hillska]

What format is the video you are wanting to edit?

Tivo file.

After more experimentation, I was able to get more crop marks.  The problem was that the new crop marks were overlaid over the old, so I didn't see them at first.  Further, I found them hard to separate into their proper pairs.  Very cumbersome interface.

Anyway, I also have now been successful in editing a tivo file.  No thanks to roxio tech support.

Thanks for all the help in this thread.

[Tim Hewett]

How do you delete unwanted crop markers? So far I've only been able to do so using the "clear all markers" menu option.

In case anyone has a problem where they set several crop in/out points but where only the first one gets into the final edited video (the others get ignored), you are probably doing the same as I did by using the crop markers to show which bits you want to have IN the final output, and then using the "invert markers" option to get around the bug mentioned earlier in this thread. That doesn't work (surprise), you have to crop on the basis of what you don't want from the outset, invert markers doesn't work except for the first crop set.

[Tim Hewett]

How do you delete unwanted crop markers? So far I've only been able to do so using the "clear all markers" menu option.

In case anyone has a problem where they set several crop in/out points but where only the first one gets into the final edited video (the others get ignored), you are probably doing the same as I did by using the crop markers to show which bits you want to have IN the final output, and then using the "invert markers" option to get around the bug mentioned earlier in this thread. That doesn't work (surprise), you have to crop on the basis of what you don't want from the outset, invert markers doesn't work except for the first crop set.

I take back my comments on how to do the editing, that approach worked once only. I've tried it several times since and it will only put the first cropped section in the output, the others were ignored.

HOW did Roxio let this software out the door?

[tsantee]

I take back my comments on how to do the editing, that approach worked once only. I've tried it several times since and it will only put the first cropped section in the output, the others were ignored.

HOW did Roxio let this software out the door?

If I understand your posts correctly you are wanting the marked areas to be the part that's kept rather than the part that is excluded, and that isn't working right. Why not mark the parts that you want excluded leaving the unmarked parts as what you want kept?

I haven't checked to see what happens if I choose Invert because I haven't needed to do that.

[Tim Hewett]

If I understand your posts correctly you are wanting the marked areas to be the part that's kept rather than the part that is excluded, and that isn't working right. Why not mark the parts that you want excluded leaving the unmarked parts as what you want kept?

I did start out by using the crop markers to select that should be included rather than excluded since that's the way the rest of the world works when doing editing. Then I realised this was including the bits I wanted excluded and excluding the bits I wanted included so I started using the invert markers function but that didn't work either.

So then I inverted my own logic and selected the bits to be excluded instead, and that worked once and once only. I have a H.264 1080i TV recording of American Pie 2 which has 3 ad breaks, and I want to cut out the breaks as well as the few minutes of extra recording at the start and end. So that means cropping up to the start of the film, from the end of the film to the end of the recording, and the 3 ad breaks in between, i.e. 5 crop sections. I then choose "save to disk image" in Toast to have it all saved in Bluray format and the only video put into it is from the start of the film to the first ad break (apart from the first time I tried, when it worked ok apart from extra GOPs either side of the crop points, which is why I went to redo it and have so far failed to do so, including after restarting Toast etc. etc.).

[tsantee]

I haven't tried editing with an H.264 video using Toast and all  my 1080i ones are MPEG-2. I'll take a look.

[Tim Hewett]

I haven't tried editing with an H.264 video using Toast and all  my 1080i ones are MPEG-2. I'll take a look.

I found out how to delete individual crop markers... you select it and press the delete key! No menu, no control-click, no drag away from the bar, just a key press. Better than nothing, but, like so much to do with this part of Toast, unintuitive.

If you can work out how to burn multiple crops that would be terrific. At present I'm saving each individual crop into a disk image then aggregating them into one. Very cumbersome!

[tsantee]

I found out how to delete individual crop markers... you select it and press the delete key! No menu, no control-click, no drag away from the bar, just a key press. Better than nothing, but, like so much to do with this part of Toast, unintuitive.

If you can work out how to burn multiple crops that would be terrific. At present I'm saving each individual crop into a disk image then aggregating them into one. Very cumbersome!

Thanks for the tip about deleting the markers. This test will take awhile. It may be a couple days before I'll have my own results. I also don't know if I can create a 1080i H.264 video. I'm going to create a 720x480 one first.

[Tim Hewett]

Thanks for the tip about deleting the markers. This test will take awhile. It may be a couple days before I'll have my own results. I also don't know if I can create a 1080i H.264 video. I'm going to create a 720x480 one first.

If you have a drop box then I can upload a sample, 100Mbytes = about 1 min 20 secs with my recording's bit rate.

[tsantee]

If you have a drop box then I can upload a sample, 100Mbytes = about 1 min 20 secs with my recording's bit rate.

So far everything I've tried has worked the way it is supposed to work. I took a 1920x1080 MPEG 2 video and converted it to H.264. I then trimmed that video in three places and chose save as disc image (with Blu-Ray as the format). The edits all were made in the final video.

When you make the edits there is a time length showing at the left of the edit window. Is it reporting the shorter time each time you make an edit? It does for me.

[Tim Hewett]

So far everything I've tried has worked the way it is supposed to work. I took a 1920x1080 MPEG 2 video and converted it to H.264. I then trimmed that video in three places and chose save as disc image (with Blu-Ray as the format). The edits all were made in the final video.

When you make the edits there is a time length showing at the left of the edit window. Is it reporting the shorter time each time you make an edit? It does for me.

It does report the shorter time for me too.

When Toast gets to the stage of making the disk image, there seem to be two substages: the first is "multiplexing" and the second is actually writing the disk image (the % complete number and bar counts up for the first stage, then resets and counts up again for the second stage).

The multiplexing substage seems to take full account of the editing points, e.g. in my case it starts counting at around 6% (skipping the extra recording at the start), and skips forward about 3% at 27%, 51% and 80%, which is where the ad breaks are. The problem comes after this when it tries to write the disk image, the % counter runs much more quickly than if the whole movie is edited with one crop (i.e. including the ads), and in the end the disk image only contains the section up to and including the first ad break. It should be around 8GB in size, but it is 1.9GB in practice.

[tsantee]

It does report the shorter time for me too.

When Toast gets to the stage of making the disk image, there seem to be two substages: the first is "multiplexing" and the second is actually writing the disk image (the % complete number and bar counts up for the first stage, then resets and counts up again for the second stage).

The multiplexing substage seems to take full account of the editing points, e.g. in my case it starts counting at around 6% (skipping the extra recording at the start), and skips forward about 3% at 27%, 51% and 80%, which is where the ad breaks are. The problem comes after this when it tries to write the disk image, the % counter runs much more quickly than if the whole movie is edited with one crop (i.e. including the ads), and in the end the disk image only contains the section up to and including the first ad break. It should be around 8GB in size, but it is 1.9GB in practice.

I just checked with your sample .m2ts file and you are correct that edits in that video with Toast are messed up. I also tried using the Convert window to export the video using the h.264 setting which resulted in an .mp4 file. This was edited okay with Toast (the editor is different in that case) but there was nothing I could do to prevent Toast from re-encoding that file when saving as a Blu-Ray disc image.

I suggest using the Feedback link in the Toast Help menu to inform Roxio of the troubles Toast is having editing this kind of source video.

Addendum: I just tried the same thing with Toast 10 and the edits were as marked. So upgrading to Toast 10 is the solution.

Edited by tsantee, 21 February 2009 - 03:32 PM.

[Tim Hewett]

I just checked with your sample .m2ts file and you are correct that edits in that video with Toast are messed up. I also tried using the Convert window to export the video using the h.264 setting which resulted in an .mp4 file. This was edited okay with Toast (the editor is different in that case) but there was nothing I could do to prevent Toast from re-encoding that file when saving as a Blu-Ray disc image.

I suggest using the Feedback link in the Toast Help menu to inform Roxio of the troubles Toast is having editing this kind of source video.

Addendum: I just tried the same thing with Toast 10 and the edits were as marked. So upgrading to Toast 10 is the solution.

Still trying to work out how I managed to have it work successfully once. Do you know how the cropping information is shared between Toast Video Player and the main Toast application? If there's a shared file somewhere then I may have a try at adjusting it to see if I can get it to work better.

Not worth upgrading to Toast 10 just for this, anyway upgrades should be for new features rather than bug fixes. Toast 10 doesn't seem to bring much by way of new features anyway.

[tsantee]

Still trying to work out how I managed to have it work successfully once. Do you know how the cropping information is shared between Toast Video Player and the main Toast application? If there's a shared file somewhere then I may have a try at adjusting it to see if I can get it to work better.

Not worth upgrading to Toast 10 just for this, anyway upgrades should be for new features rather than bug fixes. Toast 10 doesn't seem to bring much by way of new features anyway.

I couldn't figure out a pattern to it. Regardless of your logic that you shouldn't need to upgrade to have this work, how much is your time worth to you as you continue fighting this?